Yen-Ju Chen
(she/her)
Biography
Franzine (Yen-Ju) Chen (b. 1998) is a Taiwan-born curator based between Taiwan and Glasgow, working across contemporary visual art, performance, and cultural programming. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration, spatial activation, audience engagement, and cross-cultural exchange.
Prior to her curatorial studies, Chen worked across theatre and cultural venues in Taiwan, with experience spanning audience engagement, programme marketing, and the activation of theatre foyers and transitional spaces through artist residencies and cultural programming. In Scotland, she served as Marketing Manager and Front-of-House Lead for the 2025 Taiwan Film Festival in Scotland, supporting the presentation of 18 Taiwanese films in Glasgow.
A Vivid Confluence: Tiânn (2026) was Chen’s final master’s project in the M.Litt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) programme at The Glasgow School of Art/University of Glasgow. Bringing together artists and creative practitioners from Taiwan, the United States, and Scotland, the interdisciplinary project translated the Taiwanese spatial concept of tiânn into a contemporary art context through visual art, installation, sound, live performance, and audience participation, fostering dialogue across cultural perspectives, local memories, and artistic practices.
Following graduation, with support from the Taiwan Global Pathfinders Initiative (TGPI), Chen will continue collaborating with Thinking Culture, where she previously undertook a placement, contributing to programme development and cross-cultural exchange between Taiwan and Scotland. She also seeks to develop international collaborations connecting artists, cultural practitioners, and institutions across different cultural contexts.
A Vivid Confluence: Tiânn 2026
Curated by Franzine (Yen-Ju) Chen
Collaborators: Amara Karapas (Featured Artist), Rho McGuire (Performance Artist), Hsu Yuan-Cheng (Sound Collaboration), Bertram Huang (Graphic Design)
Venue: Civic House, Glasgow
Exhibition Dates: 3–4 August 2026
Opening & Live Performance: 3 August, 14:00
A Vivid Confluence: Tiânn is a site-responsive project bringing together a contemporary art exhibition and live performance. Taking Tiânn (埕), a spatial concept rooted in Tâi-gí (台語, Taiwanese Hokkien language) and everyday culture, as its starting point, the project explores how this socially embedded space—with its particular geographical and cultural contexts—might be translated through cross-cultural artistic collaboration into a contemporary curatorial context in Glasgow.
Led by Taiwanese curator Franzine (Yen-Ju) Chen, the project brought together four artists from Taiwan, Scotland and the United States through an approximately two-month collaborative process, culminating in a public presentation at Civic House, Glasgow, from 3–4 August 2026. Rather than attempting to reproduce or reconstruct the specifically Taiwanese customs and cultural imagery associated with Tiânn, the project asks: Could the spatial and social logics embedded within Tiânn offer an alternative framework for thinking about the exhibition as a place of gathering and encounter? Through this proposition, artistic practices shaped by different cultural and geographical contexts were brought into coexistence, interaction and negotiation, allowing new relationships to emerge.
The title A Vivid Confluence encapsulates this curatorial approach. Confluence describes a condition in which different elements meet and intersect; within the project, it refers to the bringing together of cultures, histories, memories, artistic media and sensory forms within a shared relational field, without seeking to erase their differences or tensions. Vivid, meanwhile, emphasises the everyday and embodied qualities of these encounters. The exhibition is therefore approached not as a static space for the display of objects, but as a living environment continually shaped by bodies, sounds, materials and social interactions.
